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A Thai-influenced buffet

I like Thai food and think that some of the best things are the the starters and finger food. On Saturday evening I put together a Thai-influenced buffet, so that we could eat while we were watching the rugby world cup on the telly.

There were marinated pork skewers, prawn skewers, chicken wontons, mini spring rolls and mini samosas (these last two were bought from the Oriental supermarket), saté sauce, sweet chilli dipping sauce (from a bottle) and a mixed salad. There were enough skewers for each of us to have a couple of both kinds.

The pork and prawns were marinated for a few hours.

The pork was a cubed tenderloin, marinated in a mixture of soy sauce, sugar and fish sauce and the prawns were deveined and marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil and fish sauce. They were then cooked on a hot griddle at the last minute.

To go with these I made a saté sauce. This was simple to do using the food processor.

I put a small carton of creamed coconut, two generous teaspoonfuls of red curry paste, a good handful of roasted peanuts, s teaspoon of sugar and the juice of a lime into the processor and whizzed it until smooth. This was then heated through in a saucepan before serving. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo of the sauce.

The chicken wontons were made with chicken thigh meat blended in the processor with Chinese chives, light soy sauce, a tablespoonful of cornflour, Szechuan pepper and a splash of sesame oil and I used bought wonton wrappers, which are an excellent thing to have round for meals like this. I put a teaspoon of the filling in the centre of the wonton wrappers, which I then dampened around the edges before crimping into little bags. These were deep-fried while the pork skewers were cooking. I also deep-fried some bought vegetable spring rolls and mini curry samosas. Oriental supermarkets are great for buying ready made spring rolls, dim sum etc.